Today, 6 new eTextbooks were added to the open educational resources collection of the NCLOR. Open SUNY Textbooks is an open access textbook publishing initiative established by State University of New York libraries and supported by SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grants. This pilot initiative publishes high-quality, cost-effective course resources by engaging faculty as authors and peer-reviewers, and libraries as publishing service and infrastructure.

The pilot launched in 2012, providing an editorial framework and service to authors, students and faculty, and establishing a community of practice among libraries.

This week the Khan Academy collection in the NCLOR was updated to included more electrical engineering resources. In fact, over 260 items were added to the collection with topics that included: amplifiers, circuit analysis, electricity and magnetism, electrostatics, semiconductor devices, reverse engineering, and signals & systems. The content also included resources on robotics like how to make home-made robots and Lego robotics.

These additional resources join a large collection already in the NCLOR that include content in math, biology, chemistry, finance, physics, and history. The Khan Academy is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation award winning not-for-profit organization with the goal of changing education for the better. Each video in this series is a digestible chunk of information, approximately 10 minutes long, closed captioned, and especially purposed for viewing on the computer.

Example Video: “What is inside an alarm clock radio?“, Created by Karl Wendt.

The NCCCS courses that these resource may supplement are: ATR211 and EGR210.

To access these resources, you can do any of the following:

Log into the NCLOR and click on the More button on the left menu bar. Then click the Resource Series link and then “Khan Academy” .

If you are K-14 faculty, you can add the links to the resources directly to your LMS based course. (learn how)

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Today, the NCLOR added a 100+ video series from Science Friday (SciFri). For 25 years SciFri introduced top scientists to public radio listeners, and reminded them how much fun it is to learn something new. But it is more than just a radio show. They produce award-winning digital videos, original web articles, and educational resources for teachers and informal educators. All of the work is independently produced by the Science Friday Initiative, a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing the public’s access to science and scientific information. Public Radio International (PRI) distributes the radio show, which you can catch on public radio stations across the U.S.

The videos in this series include topics in the subjects of: Arts, Biology, Chemistry, Design, Earth Science, Engineering, Food Science, Health, and Physics.

Today, seventy-five resources from the University of Cambridge were added to the open educational resources collection within the NCLOR. In this series, you can find out about some of the research, discoveries and innovations that take place at Cambridge University. In particular, a collection of short films in which top researchers reveal some of their latest findings and discuss subjects ranging from energy to disappearing languages, and policing the streets to the future of robotics.

The topics included in this series are:

Cambridge Shorts – short films from top researchers at Cambridge

Lines of Thought – Discoveries that Changed the World – videos from the Cambridge Library

Nano-materials Up Close – images from a electron microscope

Under the Microscope – videos that capture glimpses of the natural and man-made world in stunning close-up

Engineering – department of engineering based videos at University of Cambridge

Law – videos relating to law at the University of Cambridge.

Example: Airflow across a wing engineering video – University of Cambridge

The Virtual Cell Animation resource series has been updated in the NCLOR. This resource series from the World Wide Web Instructional Committee at North Dakota State University is a set of high-quality animations of molecular and cellular processes. This collection has been developed to introduce students to new concepts. By walking through the still images and a movie included for each topic, viewers are in control of choosing the learning style that best fits their needs.

There are a total of 25 resources included in this series on the topics of molecular and cellular processes as well as cellular energy conversion. The animations added with this update include: Glycolysis – Overview, Glycolysis Reactions, The Citric Acid Cycle – Overview, The Citric Acid Cycle – Reactions, and Energy Consumption.

All items in this resource series now have a YouTube video (closed captioned) and a flash-based movie of each animation, a zip file of annotated still images from the animations, and a text file of the animation narration (where needed).

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Over 170 new science videos have been added to the NCLOR’s Open Educational Resource collection. The new video topics included in the BozemanScience Series AP Physics and AP Environmental Science. This latest addition to the collection adds to the 300 videos already available. BozemanScience is a video series maintained by Paul Andersen. Paul has provided training for thousands of students, teachers, administrators, and professors around the world.

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Technology is penetrating our lives in various ways, shapes and forms. It can be expected that the flow of tech innovations will continue into the future and create job opportunities for those willing to invest in the skills to master them.

Example: Image of micro drone hovering.

In that effort, the NCLOR staff has compiled a list of available resources that showcases few emerging technologies fields. The NCLOR staff has created a series showcases the resources in the NCLOR about some new and emerging job fields.

Example: 3D Printer creating frog prototype.

The new technology fields included in this series are: (Click on the links below to view the resources in each field.)

The NCLOR service will be temporarily unavailable from 7:00-8:30 PM on Tuesday, August 30th. The downtime is required for standard maintenance and upgrades from the hosting data center. The NCLOR staff apologizes in advance for any inconvenience this short downtime may cause.

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This week, the UNC-TV PBS LearningMedia resources were updated in the NCLOR. Over 2,300 resources were added to the 14,000 resources already available. These PBS Learning Media resources are made available to North Carolina Community College users through a partnership between UNC-TV and the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI). The collection is closed and can only be made available to current NCCCS users in North Carolina.

NCCCS users will have access to over 16,200 media-rich resources especially designed for teachers and students including self-guided lessons, lesson plans, videos, interactives, and hundreds of images. Some of the content added in this update include video clips from series like; NOVA, FRONTLINE, American Experience, PBS NewsHour, and Ken Burns: Jackie Robinson, just to name a few.

Example: Discovering Planets Outside Our Solar System from the series “Genius by Stephen Hawking”

There are currently thousands of videos, stored in or linked, in the NCLOR that include closed captions. In an effort to make the NCLOR more accessible and help NCCCS faculty find ADA compliant resources, a filter to view only videos that have closed captions has been added to advance searches.

On the NCCCS advance searches, a selection to only return videos or interactive resources that include closed captions has been added to the option set. (shown in image 1 below)

Reminders of the need to use closed captions when contributing video resources to the NCLOR have also been added to the each of the NCCCS collection wizards. The reminder is configured to display when the user selects “Video” from the learning resource type option. (shown in image 2 below)